C. S. Lewis on prayer
AFTER C. S. LEWIS · LETTERS TO MALCOLM (1964)
Lewis never wrote about prayer as a master, but as a man who finds it hard. That is exactly why he is worth learning from: he does not start with technique, he starts with honesty. Letters to Malcolm are letters to a friend — not a manual.
Lewis offers no method, just a handful of notes from practice — written more as a warning about what he himself got wrong.
Prayer is not an escape from action but its other half. Lewis sums it up drily: we work as if everything depended on us, and we pray because it does not.
Lewis admits without ceremony that he puts prayer off and gets bored during it. He does not take that as proof that he is a bad Christian — but as the normal state of someone who is still learning to be real.
We send a polished version of ourselves into prayer — the one that says the right things and feels the right feelings. But God cannot meet someone who is not actually there.
Stretches with no appetite and no response belong to prayer. In those times it is not feeling that carries it but routine — and Lewis argues that these “dry” prayers may be the ones with the sweetest scent to God.
Praying at the last minute with your head on the pillow is, for Lewis, the worst slot of the day. He advises finding a window when you can still really think — on the train, say, or on the way home from work.
No special posture, no special room. Lewis prayed on walks and in packed trains. Anyone waiting for ideal conditions usually does not pray at all.
Start with whatever is really on your mind — even if it is completely trivial. Only when a real person is on the table is there anyone for the conversation to happen with.
Your own words alone get tiring and go round in circles; set prayers alone send you to sleep. Lewis combines the two — and “decorates” the set words with content of his own.
When you feel nothing, do not stop — just make it shorter. A short, regular, honest prayer is worth more than a long one you force out once a month.
Words said out loud cannot be unthought as easily as a thought can. And the pause between sentences is not an empty space — it is room for the other side.
Kneeling has its weight, but concentration has more: a focused mind sitting down is a better prayer than a kneeling body with a half-asleep mind. The body should pray along with the soul — it does both of them good.
Do not begin adoration with grand thoughts about creation and redemption — begin with whatever is giving you pleasure right now: water in a stream, birdsong, a patch of sunlight. Every clean joy is a glimpse of God’s glory; turn it into a channel of praise.
God does not need to be summoned — the world is crammed with him, he “goes about everywhere incognito”. The real hard work of prayer is remembering and paying attention: waking up, and above all staying awake.
A religious emotion worked up on purpose is a wretched thing. And fervour proves no depth: someone praying in fear prays fervently — but all that proves is that fear is a fervent emotion.
In prayer Lewis discovered that he had finally forgiven a man he had been trying to forgive for over thirty years — trying, and asking for it. When forgiveness will not come, do not stop asking for it; one day it will come “so easily”.
Prayer is a request — and it belongs to the nature of a request that it need not be granted. Even the holiest petitioner prayed three times in Gethsemane that the cup might pass from him; prayer is not an infallible trick.
Before Lewis asks for anything, he asks for one thing: that it really is he who is speaking — and really God he is speaking to. This is not about “not putting on an act before God”. It is about something bigger: reality is not what it looks like to us.
Lewis compares it to the theatre: you are sitting in the audience and the house on stage looks like a house. But if you took a hammer to it, you would not smash a brick — you would punch a hole in the canvas. The brick is only painted. Prayer is the moment you remember that you are sitting in a theatre.
Reality is far bigger than the part of it we see — it is full of things we do not see, and in prayer we remind ourselves that they are there. The real self is deeper than today’s roles and moods, the real You is bigger than all my ideas about God. That is why Lewis begins each day with this request again.
Lewis does not avoid set prayers — he just hangs his own decorations on them. He calls it festooning: at each petition of the Lord’s Prayer he stops and hangs something concrete from his own day on it.
The set words keep his prayer from shrinking to whatever happens to occur to him. The decorations keep him from merely reciting the words.
The Lord’s Prayer as the skeleton, your day as the flesh. The decorations change every day; the skeleton stays.
What does festooning actually look like? This is how Lewis hangs his garlands on the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer:
“Thy kingdom come. That is: may your rule be made real here, as it is made real there. I usually take the word there on three levels:
as in a sinless world without the horrors in the life of animals and people; in the behaviour of the stars, the trees and the water, in the sunrise and in the wind. May the first beginnings of such beauty be here too (in my heart).
as in the lives of the best people I know; in those who really do carry their burdens and give an impression of sincerity, and in the quiet, industrious, orderly life of good families and genuinely good monasteries. May this be here too.
and in the usual sense: as in heaven, among our blessed dead.
The word here, though, must not be taken to mean only ‘in my heart’, but also in this college — in England — and in the world at large.”
The commonest objection runs: why ask anything of a God who knows everything better? Lewis answers that a request is not an attempt to manipulate God. God lets the world run through causes — and he has entrusted some of them to us. Washing your hands and praying are two of them.
He calls it the dignity of causes: God has not left us merely watching. He lets us actually cause something — and takes on the risk that we will make a mess of it.
That is also why answered prayer cannot be measured statistically. Prayer is a request from one person to another, and the answer is allowed to be no. Lewis points to Gethsemane: the most perfect prayer in history was refused — and yet the rescue of the world came out of it.
“My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” Matt 26:39 · Gethsemane — Lewis’ anchor for petition (The Efficacy of Prayer; letter 8)
A small exercise from Lewis’ letters: when you hear a roaring, you sense that it is the roar of the wind. In just the same way, when you sit on the moss enjoying the sun flickering through the leaves, you can know that all of it is a reflection pointing to the Creator.
Simply noticing it is already worship and praise. You do not even need to pick up an instrument and write a song about it. The moment itself can be gratitude for the fact that God gave you a moment like this.
And the worship is in the joy: what must he be like, if even his reflections are like this?
Lewis prayed entirely without words for years — and that is exactly why he knows what words are for. He also knows that his silence is not the same as the silence of the mystics.
“The words are in any case secondary. They are only an anchor. Or, shall I say, they are the movements of a conductor's baton: not the music. They serve to canalise the worship, or penitence, or petition which might without them — such are our minds — spread into wide and shallow puddles. It does not matter very much who first put them together.”
For many years Lewis’ main path was prayer entirely without words. In Letters to Malcolm he describes how — and why he eventually gave ground on it:
“For many years after my conversion I used no set prayers apart from the Lord’s Prayer. In fact I tried to pray without words — not to put spiritual movements into words at all. Even when praying for other people I think I usually avoided their names and simply held them in my mind. I still believe that wordless prayer is the best — if you can really manage it. But I now know that in trying to make it my daily bread I was relying on more mental and spiritual strength than I actually have. To pray without words successfully you have to be genuinely ‘in form’. Otherwise the inner acts are mere imagination or emotion — and a worked-up emotion is a very sorry thing. When that marvellous moment comes and God grants us real wordless prayer, only a fool would turn such a gift down! But he does not hand it out — certainly not to me — every day. My mistake was what Pascal, if I remember rightly, calls ‘the error of Stoicism’: thinking we can always do what we can only do now and then.”
“When I spoke of praying without words I did not mean anything as exalted as what the mystics call the ‘prayer of silence’. And when I said one has to be ‘in form’, I did not mean that in a purely spiritual sense. Physical condition plays its part too; I believe a person can be in a state of grace and still be very sleepy.”
Teresa of Ávila has her own infographic on this site — and Lewis himself felt the need to explain that his “without words” is not the same as what the mystics call the prayer of silence (Teresa calls it the prayer of quiet). The difference matters:
- Active: you perform the inner acts yourself — adoring, asking, giving thanks — you just do not clothe them in words. It is still you who is “speaking”.
- It depends on condition: it requires being “in form”, physically too — sleepiness kills it.
- Foothills, not cliffs: Lewis says of himself that he is “a man of the foothills” — he does not venture onto “the cliffs of mysticism” and does not think everyone is called to them.
- A fallback anchor: when his strength is not enough, he reaches for words — set prayers and festoons.
- Infused: a supernatural state that “we cannot reach on our own, however hard we try” — God gives it as a gift (The Way of Perfection, ch. 31).
- Passive: your own acts cease — the will comes to rest, captured by God’s peace, while reason and imagination go on flitting about. Teresa advises not fighting them but “laughing at them”.
- A stage on the way: it belongs to the fourth mansions of The Interior Castle — where the water laboriously piped in by aqueducts ends and a spring begins to well up.
- Not on command: trying to manufacture it by technique is, for Teresa, a loss for both reason and will.
The point of contact is deeper than it looks: even Lewis’ “golden moments”, when wordless prayer really does come off, are for him a gift God does not give every day — and his ‘Pascalian error of Stoicism’ is essentially the same lesson Teresa teaches about quiet: an occasional gift cannot be turned into a method. The difference is one of floors. With Lewis the gift occasionally visits his own active prayer; with Teresa it is an infused state, a stage of the way in its own right. Today’s evangelical world is arranged the same way: Richard Foster and Dallas Willard warmly recommend Teresa, Timothy Keller builds prayer consistently on the Word and handles contemplation carefully — and Lewis, an Anglican with honest self-irony (“I was no mountaineer, I hadn’t the head for it”), fits into that conversation exactly: he respects the mystics, but sets his own everyday prayer one floor lower — on words, festoons and honesty.
More infographics
Prayer: The Interior CastleAfter Teresa of Ávila
Prayer: The Game with MinutesAfter Frank C. Laubach
Frequency of prayerAfter the pilgrims of the Interior Castle
Two mentalities: Shalom vs. EmpireBased on the Bema podcast
Chiasm: Treasure huntBased on the Bema podcast
The kingdom of God: Map and timelineBased on the Bema podcast and MH
Map of the disciplinesAfter Dallas Willard
D. Willard: Renovation of the HeartBased on Renovation of the Heart
D. Willard: Hearing GodBased on the book Hearing God
Keller: Prayer — toil or delight?Based on the book Prayer
N. T. Wright on prayerBased on the book The Lord and His Prayer
The Minor Prophets: Twelve voicesBased on the Bema podcast
The Gospels: Four voicesBased on the Bema podcast2×
Seeking and strayingAfter the testimonies of ten pilgrims
The quiet revivalBased on The Quiet Revival
Groups of Jesus' dayBased on the Bema podcast